It appears that a majority of conscionable peoples opposed to their nation's war mongering for “imperial mobilization” in the guise of fighting the 'war on terrorism', have actually given up on the idea that they can preemptively prevent wars.

The experience of the dismal failure of anti-war demonstrations since 911, and other inefficacious symbolic protests has taught many of us once again that this isn't the Vietnam era of the 1960s. The social control is enormous, the attachments to the pursuit of the elusive 'American Dream' even stronger, and hence all consuming, and despite tethering at the brink of financial bankruptcy, the nation still persists in participating in the 'war on terror', still persists in paying its taxes to fund the war, and still persists in shedding its own blood. But mainly the 'lesser' blood of economic conscription.

Thus in a sense, with rising disparity in wealth and increasing unemployment in the American nation, there is a concomitant supply of recruits right out of high school from among the lesser privileged class, who, for the lure of a signup bonus, or the promise of an education and good living, are not shy of shedding other peoples' blood to get 'ahead' in life. It matters little that if they even come back in one piece physically, they are usually shattered mentally – for then, these 'rejects' of economic conscription and battle fatigue are as dispensable as those whom they had earlier made dispensable. A self sustaining system of recruiting soldiers is being constructed domestically within the United States that parallels the self sustaining system of creating the 'terrorists' to fight the perpetual 'war on terror' against, for the entire slated lifetime of “World War IV”.

It is amazing how politically astute President George Bush was when he dismissed the anemic protests throughout the United States of America before the buildup of war on Iraq in February 2003, as simply a “focus group”, stating:

“First of all, you know, size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security -- in this case, the security of the people.”

Most conscionable peoples who abhorred the idea of war mongering, at the time made fun of President George Bush – without appreciating the treadmill that had been constructed for them to keep them inefficaciously occupied while the 'war on terror' made incremental baby-step progress through small faits accomplis of continually creating more “revolutionary times” in the “Global Zone of Percolating Violence” which made, what was otherwise “inconceivable in normal times”, entirely “possible”. It spanned the gamut of peoples willingly giving up their “essential liberties for a bit of temporary safety” from the ubiquitous terrorists hiding under their beds, to acquiescing to invade other unarmed, disarmed, and sitting-duck nations with the barbarianism of unparalleled “shock and awe”. With all newsmedia cheerleading the war effort, most peoples in America were initially not impacted by the wars being fought 20,000 miles away in some exotic lands of the unknown 'barbarians' who had dared to attack America!

But seven years have now passed, and most Americans are now indeed being impacted even in their daily lives due to the far away battles. With diminishing social spending, as a major chunk of the national budget is going into “imperial mobilization”, which in FY 2009 is slated to be 3.2 trillion dollars, the soaring gas prices that is now past $4.0 a gallon, and the cost of living shooting skywards in sync with rising bankruptcies and housing crises, most peoples have had enough.

And yet, the same handful of conscientious rabble rousers are no where near doing anything different from what they were doing 7 years ago. Most are still clamoring for “impeachment”, still clamoring for mindless protests in streets, and still merely paying lip service to the proverbial dissent on the treadmill of inefficacy. Instead of trying to understand the reasons for their inefficacy and failure, instead of conducting post-mortems to understand the nature of the beast that is driving the train of “imperial mobilization”, or indeed, what “imperial mobilization” really means in practice apart from its bombastic sounding import, and instead of studying its methods and tactics, instead of using Jujitsu and Judo on the opponents in astute gamesmanship on the 'Grand Chessboard', the conscionable peoples have continually worked outside the pale of the very institutional frameworks which the 'hectoring hegemons' have figured out how to exploit effectively to seize the many instruments of 'empire' in order to realize their own objectives of “full spectrum dominance”. At best, some sit as spectators in imposing testimonies by various 'hectoring hegemons' before the Congress, holding merely their placards or courageously shouting “Bring them home! Bring them home!” and “promptly [being] escorted out of the committee room and arrested.” How effective!

Vladimir Putin summed up the achievements of the 'hectoring hegemons' so aptly last year that it is worth repeating to the Americans over and over again:

“what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.”

And yet the dissent space and its glorified dissenting priests still wander-on aimlessly, or perhaps deliberately, condemned for the entire lifetime of World War IV to remain on the treadmill of inefficacy, lost, so to speak, searching for the 'land of Canaan'.

For the past seven years, since 911, not a single institutional frame-work construction was pursued by the dissent space. Some of these ideas were outlined in Chapter 7 of this 2003 book “Prisoners of the Cave.” Not a single post-mortem was conducted to understand why dissent has failed. Yet hundreds, or perhaps thousands of public speeches and gatherings have been enacted, and hundreds of books have been written to make lots of big bucks for a handful of dissenting priests. A majority of these books contain no prescriptions, only rehearsed histories or narratives of various crimes in progress. Yet, not a single institution has been constructed that could become an effective counterpoint to the 'hectoring hegemons', nor any institutional changes vigorously pursued that could efficaciously 'check' the hectoring hegemons' attempts to further their diabolical craftsmanship of “imperial mobilization”.

Only proclamations, platitudes, and bravados is all that is on record from the famed American dissent space and its dissenting priests. As a mere plebeian, I too am equally guilty of failing to stop “imperial mobilization”despite much vigorous 'jihad' on the 'treadmill'. It's high time to end that losing streak on this treadmill of inefficacy that has worked great in favor of the hectoring hegemons don't you think? Indeed, if I was one of them, I'd just love this dissent space! For it simultaneously achieves two purposes: one, it evidently makes little domestic impact on “imperial mobilization”; and two, it gives a convenient illusion to the conscionable peoples who are sure to arise in any community, that they are engaged in serious battle for their 'Civil Rights', for 'World Peace', for 'Justice', for motherhood, and apple pie.

And some 'activist' members of the Congress who oppose the war mongering and invading of other nations on false pretexts, have already resigned themselves to the idea that there is nothing they can do about the imminent attack, and instead, have become content in only issuing what they will do afterwards, even gaining some traction among the dissent stream:

“He [John Conyers] is circulating a letter among his colleagues for signatures, a letter addressed to Bush letting him know that an attack on Iran will result in impeachment hearings. LET'S ASK EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS TO SIGN ON! I know it seems bassackwards and we want impeachment before a new war, not after, but this is a way for us to show Conyers the support that will be there any time he moves forward.”

Surely the lives and tabula rasa of 70 million peoples in that densely populated region of humanity – the cradle itself of the Western civilization, and among the oldest on earth – cannot be a foregone conclusion?

Surely this isn't merely a game? A dog thrown on the freeway in Los Angeles gets more sympathy from the entire American nation than the 'lesser' peoples who experienced, are experiencing, and surely will experience – unless the courageous peoples of America and the world put a stop to it – the imperial “algebra of infinite justice”.

There must be a better way than just empty and entirely vacuous threats of what one will do afterwards, ex post facto, such as "impeachment".

So what, even if this 'magic bullet' was magically unsheathed and lodged into a single instance of monumental criminals after more than 2000 'targets' are obliterated, some with nuclear weapons, in a defenseless nation that possesses no effective deterrence against predatory high-tech nuclear invasion? And these “impeached” criminals will be replaced by another of the same genre of 'hectoring hegemons' soon enough. What one does after the nuclear 'Rubicon' is crossed becomes rather irrelevant to the victims don't you think? Surely it mattered much to the cataclysmic destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the entire “Global Zone of Percolating Violence” from Kosovo to Lebanon, how hard the antiwar protesters yelled in the streets of America? Or that it mattered greatly to the dead Vietnamese, or the forgottened Cambodians, and the even lesser known Laotians, that Nixon left office in disgrace! I can imagine someone suggesting that surely, we ended up saving several millions of the 'lesser' humanity by ending the American killing spree sooner! It would be interesting to see if a restitution court ordered an 'eye for an eye' restitution plus fair compensation for pain and suffering by the standards of the aggressor civilization itself, that whether anyone from the aggressor civilization might still think so!

The entire point must be that the nuclear Rubicon is NEVER ever crossed.

That “imperial mobilization” is itself derailed as the DNA imprint of America's foreign policy abuses upon the 'lesser' humanity. It is perhaps easy to imagine the gravity of the matter if the roles were reversed, and the Iranians, now the new sole superpower, sought regime change in 'the Great Satan' with preemptive 'Deathstar' like 'Phaser' strikes that had no defense known to man? (oops – I just gave away the secret for the next mantra)

As is expressed in this humble letter by Project Humanbeingsfirst to the Journal of 911 studies courageous scientists still busily engaged in figuring out how the towers fell:

“I hope you would also permit me to share this one final lament. I sometimes sense that even well intentioned peoples in the United States often tend to forget that other's dead and destroyed are not mere statistics to their loved ones. Sitting 20,000 miles away from the murderous war zone, it is easy to become engrossed in solving the riddles of 911, or rehearsing interesting histories in conference halls that are already fait accompli. Can the conscionable peoples in this nation at least make it a point to also sometimes imagine, as a shocking thought experiment, that with every falling American bomb upon a 'lesser' peoples, paid for from their own tax dollars, their mom, dad, sister, brother, kids, wife, and the family dog is killed? What courses of action, and with what urgency, would one take then?”

let's together renew focus on how to efficaciously prevent further “imperial mobilization” under any pretexts. We have already seen that what worked in the 1960s era as a peoples' mass antiwar movement, has absolutely no traction in the modernity du jour. There are no masses to move.

The following seed idea from the heads-up warning cited earlier is based on one key insight: “Imperial mobilization” is institutional, and all encompassing. Yes a truism of course. But it leads to the following corollary: Any real resistance to “imperial mobilization”, in order to be effective, also has to be institutional, and under institutional frame-works.

If astutely and vigilantly pursued – with 'moves' look-ahead, employing both 'pawn' tactics and strategies as in a geopolitical chess game played on the 'Grand Chessboard' against 'ubermensch' Grandmasters – then it can surely create real impediments to new “imperial mobilizations”. And certainly at this stage of the domestic 'game' when the American peoples are already war-weary, deception-weary, and precariously perched at the brink of financial insolvency. In other words, the conditions are ripe in America for the following to become an efficacious measure, if it can be brought to fruition through proper 'political' planning and resource mobilization before the inevitable “oops, too late!”

“Firstly, anything, including all 'nuclear terrorist acts' on American soil, or anywhere in the world, all shocking revelations by whistleblowers, all leaks in newspapers, and all phantasmal mantras that distract from the afore-stated goal, regardless of how compelling the reasons, must be treated by the unwary and gullible American public and its intellectual dissenting-chiefs, as red herrings, pretexts, and deceptions for premeditated "imperial mobilization" by their nation's rulers.”

The quoted paragraph above is obviously where the outstanding work already done by many conscionable peoples and forensic detectives over the past several years on analyzing false pretexts for the previous phase of "imperial mobilization" to “birth-pang the new Middle East” based upon the “catalyzing event like a new pearl harbor" of 911 and the various “doctrinal motivation” based upon the fictions of WMDs and 'radical Islamism', can be useful.

However, previous expositions of history is not sufficient, even though perhaps a necessary part of the bigger picture, because, the antagonist is not uni-dimensional – but rather 'uber' sophisticated, and diabolically imaginative.

Thus, the new mantras being deftly spun, starting from the 'loose nukes' of Pakistan that will miraculously be hijacked by the 'al-qaeeda', to the presciently proclaimed 'The Day After' as prognosticated by President George Bush himself “that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison”, are the obvious setups to be blamed upon Iran. Zbigniew Brzezinski had already laid out a plausible scenario in February 2007 while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. See a further outlandishly plausible scenario that can culminate in drawing both Iran and Pakistan into “shock and awe” as the culprit nations, in the following wakeup call to the Pakistani peoples.

There are many analyses available from Project HumanbeingsfirstTM at http://humanbeingsfirst.org that already go into sufficient analytical depth to warrant reproducing any further evidence here that the 'war on terror' is a total fabrication diabolically crafted for “imperial mobilization” to achieve “full spectrum dominance” in the guise of fighting 'synthetic terror' that is easily synthesizeable, especially among the Muslims today by “shock and awing” them, maligning their religion, and ensuring that both sides or all sides are kept armed and financed in the ensuing 'Muslim on Muslim' violence. For that constructs the much needed “revolutionary times” further enabling all the necessary pretexts, mantras, and phobias to keep the American and Western peoples scared silly that these stick-wielding antediluvians are their biggest nemesis since Hitler. And these same guys in the Hindu Kush mountains will now perpetrate the next new 911.

This new “catalyzing event” will surely be so shocking – for what else can “make Sept. 11 pale by comparison” – that the Congress, which has a history of almost trivially being arm-wrestled by the Executive branch into 'United we Stand' with them, will authorize a nuclear 'retaliatory' attack as “'defensive' US military action”.

This is where there is an immediate institutional opportunity for astute intervention by the “populist democracy” which is projected to be “inimical to imperial mobilization” – the hectoring hegemons' worst nightmare:

“Secondly, if there is reason for the United States to nuclear decimate any country or any peoples in purported 'self-defense', the American peoples must demand a ratification of the decision to go to war through a public referendum – let its great “populist democracy” speak directly in the modernity of the 21st century before it is called upon to make its sacrifices, before it is called upon to pay its taxes to fund the war, and before it is called upon to acquire innocent blood on its hands!”

The quoted paragraph above is what Project Humanbeingsfirst humbly proposes become the new focus of all conscionable peoples on how to institutionally derail “imperial mobilization” from within America by its genuine American patriots. Externally, on the 'Grand Chessboard', it will only be derailed in a détente which will only come about when new “full spectrum alliances” are constructed among the Asian nations for the “full spectrum deterrence” from all foreign marauders. An example of that being the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) overnight turning into a NATO like alliance – the Asian Treaty Organization – of all the Asian countries. The ruling elite in these nations has so shrewdly been co-opted by the world's sole superpower that even in their own genuine self-defense against foreign invaders, they are unable to unite – when even the lowly buffalos are able to come together to defend their own against any 'hectoring hegemons' of nature.

Thus, staying focussed on the topic at hand, for domestic resistance to imperial barbarianism from within the United States, the idea is that enormous public pressure is immediately put on the Congress to create public hearings to examine the devolution of their powers to declare war, and to seek the pulse of the nation through direct public ratification in a public referendum, before using their own Constitutional powers to declare (or not declare) war. Please do examine this approach.

This is eminently within the existing Constitutional framework and does not require any Constitutional Amendment, as the Congress is merely creating another 'gating-input' to its decision making. Such a law would also mandate, in order to be practicable, creating credible 'systems' under which such public voting under any proposed 'declaration of war' by the Executive Branch under any circumstance can be affected within 24 to 72 hours - or that order of time-frame. It is the same time-frame under which the Congress itself labors, and thus, seeking external ratification will not hamper its own deliberation when done in parallel, but it will eventually be controlled by external public ratification – by a public whom they purportedly represent anyway under the Constitution.

Today, technologically speaking, such rapid public referendum is not only feasible, but quite practical, whereas it wasn't quite the case in the previous decades. Of course, we will not get into how 'such systems' can also be subverted-type red herring conversations here, except to note that by law, these 'systems' can also be mandated to be open-sourced, with 'legal' and public bodies mandated to oversee the systems, the processes, and the deployment and execution.

Furthermore, while the following may be thought by some as excessive polemics, it can be the real impetus for the 'next move' on the domestic 'Grand Chessboard', so to speak:

“Even better, draw the soldiers, officers and war-technicians from the pool who vote for war! If they can vote yes to invade other nations and wantonly shatter the tabula rasa of a 'lesser humanity', then they must also first be willing to sign up for doing it themselves – instead of having a draft of economic conscription. Every 'yes' voting home in America must have at least one 'patriot' from the immediate family show up on the front-lines without exception – or their 'yes' vote is void!”

The solution-space outlined in the preceding paragraphs is but one institutional approach. There may be others. But whatever the case, the resistance to “imperial mobilization” must be elevated to the national institutional-level framework somehow.

And the Congress compelled to setup public hearings on the very subject matter of 'prevention' before the fact, rather than 'reaction' ex post facto, in blanket recognition of their dastardly proclivity to be bulldozed by the Executive, and co-opted by special-interest lobby groups.

Such public hearings can be used to further explore the solution space of how Congress can temper their non-independence from the Executive. And as in the case of the overarching suggestion made here, examine devolving some of their powers to create a limited checks and balance upon their own decision making powers for certain important national decisions through direct public referendum.

This idea also creates a more participative democracy, and without requiring any Constitutional changes (and that is an important consideration for the response times needed here). Additionally, since law making at some point involves the Executive to sign-off, the Congress can examine the devolution as part of their own deliberation process, thus side-stepping the Executive. An outsider can only speculate on the modalities of implementation, and peoples more capable must look at the issues involved – but not be deterred by roadblocks that are surely to be thrown ones' way by sophisticated Straussian 'hectoring hegemons' who can construct any 'Noble Lie' and any 'technique of infamy' on the fly. One must be prepared to effectively counter the various and sundry circus clowns and patsies who will incessantly bleat nay-saying on the air.

There may still be time before the cataclysmic nuclear Rubicon is crossed. Although the attack on Iran appears imminent, it is not yet a fait accompli. There is many a slip between the cup and lip – and until that tipping point has rewritten history, the operative principle for the conscionable peoples in the United States of America must be to work on its prevention. Perhaps prominent peoples, prominent scholars and lawyers, and prominent (former) statesmen can be enlisted in this cause with an immediacy and urgency as if the lives of one's own family, and one's own loved pets, depended on it! There are supposedly 46 Congresspersons who are seeking impeachment. Perhaps they can be the beginning.

I long for that day when all nations' foreign policies, trade relations, and all international laws and interfaces are built upon the principle espoused in the Biblical Golden Rule – for what a reign of justice and peace of a thousand years would that be! Truly a “Zion that will light up all the world”. Why not?

The author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (patents here), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.

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